Joe McCarthy was right, but by now his name has been turned into
a dirty word by the same liberal, leftist propaganda machine that today is
trying to convince Americans the President “lied” to them about Iraq.

My father was a subscriber
to I.F. Stone’s famed newsletter in the 1950s and 60s. Stone was a highly
regarded “independent” journalist and his newsletter was always exposing
things about Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others who warned against Communist
spies and agents of influence. The problem was that I.F. Stone was a Soviet
agent of influence, financed by the Kremlin. My Father didn’t know that and
probably wouldn’t have believed it.

He wouldn’t have believed that Alger Hiss, a highly placed State Department
officer and the first, interim Secretary General of the United Nations, was
also a Soviet agent, or that Harry Hopkins, one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s
top advisors, was also an agent. He probably believed the Rosenbergs who
helped the Soviets get our A-bomb secrets weren’t guilty, but they were.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Manhattan Project that developed the
A-bomb, gave aid and assistance to the Soviet Union, but he was so revered
after the end of the war the government merely took away his security clearance.

The fact is Joe McCarthy was right, but by now his name has been turned into
a dirty word by the same liberal, leftist propaganda machine that today is
trying to convince Americans the President “lied” to them about Iraq. They
had to wait until after the FBI’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover, was dead
before they dared to slander his reputation.

How do we know this? The answer is “Venona,” the name given to a top secret
program to break Soviet codes and read intercepted communications between
Moscow and its intelligence stations in the West. The program began in February
1943, and was run by the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service, the forerunner of the
National Security Agency. The cables that a small cadre of very young deciphers
worked on were initially dispatched between 1940 and 1948, but the effort
continued apace from 1947 through 1952, and continued to crack the cable
codes right up to 1980.

By the end of Venona, 2,900 Soviet messages had been translated and the yield
in intelligence regarding the way the Communist Party USA, directed entirely
by the Kremlin, sought to uncover our secrets and to influence government
policies is breathtakingly astonishing. In 1995, Venona was declassified

We can be grateful to Herbert Romerstein and the late Eric Breindel for making
the huge effort to tell the story of this extraordinary cipher-breaking program
in their book, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s
Traitors (Regnery Publishing, $19.95, softcover, 608 pages). This book,
in part, documents the revelations in Ann Coulter’s current bestseller, Treason.
It is based both on the declassified Venona information and on the archives
of the Communist International that were kept in Moscow, as well as the files
of other Communist parties in Eastern and Central Europe. They became available
to researchers after the fall of the Soviet Union.

So why don’t more Americans know about the Venona project? Ask that question
of the liberal mainstream press that, to this day, still slanders the reputation
of those brave men who dared to suggest that the Communist Party USA was
a threat to this nation and that “McCarthyism” is still the real threat.
The truth is, ignoring your real enemies---as we learned on 9-11---is the
real threat.

Venona revealed that US policies were influenced or thwarted because of Americans
who were Soviet agents and served high up in our government or were in positions
to secure essential wartime information and information that affected our
nation’s policies during the course of the Cold War. They were quite different
from spies who sold out the US for money; they were the true believers in
Communism.

Frankly, I doubt my Father fully comprehended the threat of the Soviet Union
and the Cold War. I was sure, however, that he bought into every Leftist
lie of his day because his day began with the New York Times and included
reading the New Republic and even Foreign Affairs, the quarterly of the Council
on Foreign Relations. His was a steady diet of propaganda designed to make
the dictatorship of the proletariat look like a noble aspiration, a great
goal, instead of the enslavement it represented for millions behind the Iron
Curtain or subject to it in Red China, North Korea and Cuba.

You shall know the truth and it shall set you free. The truth is, in the
1940s and the decades that followed, the State Department, the US Treasury,
the CIO until it expelled some of its unions, and even the US Army, was thoroughly
infiltrated by Americans whose loyalty was to the Soviet Union, a nation
bent on the destruction of capitalism and the democracy upon which it is
based. Ironically, you can thank the Soviet Union for Social Security and
for the failure of our present educational system. Both were implemented
by Leftists, the latter being based on the former Soviet model.

Hollywood won’t tell you that. Instead, you can rent The Majestic,
starring Jim Carrey, that includes scenes of a film writer being ruined by
the “Red Scare” of the 50s. The members of the “Progressive Caucus” in Congress
won’t tell you that, but they are as Red as they come. The New York Times won’t
tell you that, but the newspaper’s long history of lies is now becoming more
widely known.

The Venona Secrets, however, spells it out and documents it. My father
died in 1993. Venona was declassified two years later. He was a good man,
an intelligent, well-read man, but he was wrong about a lot of things. He
didn’t grasp what vast numbers of ordinary, working Americans instinctively
understood. The threat was and the threat still is Communism. And now, add
to that enemy, the new one, Islam. Not surprisingly, both use terrorism as
their primary tool of conquest and control.Alan Caruba is the author of Warning Signs, published by Merril Press. His weekly commentaries are posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center.